Such men make very bad rulers

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Never act out of obstinacy, but with circumspection.  All stubbornness is a tumour [on the mind], the monstrous daughter of passion, which has never done anything properly.  There are some people who reduce everything to guerrilla warfare; the bandits of social intercourse, they would like everything they do to be a victory: they are incapable of peaceable behaviour.  Such men make very bad rulers and governors because they turn the government into a guerrilla faction and make enemies of those whom they ought to have treated as their children: they try to bring strategy into everything and achieve everything as the fruits of their cunning; but when others have discovered their perverse disposition, they turn sour on them at once.  Others try to upset their fantastic schemes, and in consequence they attain nothing.  Such people are overburdened with vexations and all these help to mortify them.  The judgement of these people is defective and, as likely as not, their hearts are in the wrong place; the way to deal with monsters like these is to fly to the Antipodes, the barbarity of which will be easier to put up with than the savagery of such men as these.

Baltasar Gracian, The Oracle: A Manual of the Art of Discretion